Posts Tagged ‘Snail Games’

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Premature Evaluation is the weekly column in which we explore the wilds of early access. This week, Fraser’s lost in PixArk, the Minecraft-inspired Ark: Survival Evolved spin-off. It’s colourful, whimsical and it’s made him extremely grumpy.

PixArk feels like the result of an algorithm designed to pick bits from popular games and Frankenstein them into something new. This is nothing new – trying to capture the zeitgeist can lead to fun places, and great successes. PixArk, however, is not a game that captures the zeitgeist, but rather something hollow, stitched together out of disparate parts seemingly without proper consideration for how they fit together or what made them work originally.

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History, scholars agree, is a washing machine on a spin cycle with a brick inside: as it bounces round and round, the brick will often return to the same point but is slightly changed by an entropy that eventually will violently shake the machine to pieces then our ma will give us a right skelping for copying YouTube videos. The cycle returns to a familiar point soon with PixArk, a Minecraftbut based on a survival game based on Minecraft. Deadly murderous survival sandbox Ark: Survival Evolved recently left early access and now the friendly spin-off PixArk is about to enter it. The brick bounces on. Read the rest of this entry »

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Early access sandbox MMORPG Dark and Light [official site] stormed the Steam charts when it launched last week, with users enticed by its dragon battles, pretty graphics and free form base-building. But the reviews on Steam have been mixed so far, with the negative ones criticising the army of bugs, like one that randomly spawns your character in lava. A bit of an inconvenience, that.

In response, developers Snail Games have detailed a huge patch (“upcoming”, with no date yet) to purge the problems, and detailed some new features that are coming to the game. They have plenty to say about optimisation and bug fixes, which you can read all about in the patch notes – that lava bug is fixed along with dozens of others. The new stuff includes goblin clubs (the smacky thinks, not the dancing ones), hidden Dark Altars on which you craft powerful items, and a new Soul Node system that means you can create respawn and fast travel points for other players in your faction.

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Open-world dinosaur survival sandbox Ark: Survival Evolved is getting a virtual reality spin off, named Ark Park [official site]. It’ll offer a theme park to wander around gawping at dinosaurs, obvs, and players will even be able to import their own dinos from Survival Evolved to hang out. I don’t know why they haven’t gone with the clearly-superior name of Jurassark Park. Could’ve got a low-framerate Dickie Attenborough lookalike clipping into the terrain, a Jeff Goldblum rubberbanding as he pummels dodos to craft himself a damn shirt. Read the rest of this entry »

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Woohoo, it’s Wushu! Excellent, I have fulfilled my dumb joke quota in the first line. Now then, come reverently kneel in the dojos of intrigue. Age of Wushu, you see, might look like a typical MMO with high-flying wuxian trappings, but – at least, on paper – it actually sounds far more daring than that. Case in point: kidnapping. When you log off, your character stays in the world as an NPC. Said NPC can actually be kidnapped by other players, which I imagine will either prove cinder-block-choppingly infuriating or absolutely hilarious. Wushu also makes bold claims about being sandbox-y, pointing to systems for bounties, crime and imprisonment, random emergent PVP, a level-free advancement system, and more. Be warned, however: it also sounds dauntingly complicated, and F2P doesn’t help matters. See what I mean – first in the form of a gentle, open-palmed video and then with harsh, skull-wobbling words – after the break.

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Those handsome chaps at Massively have scooped the announcement of Snail Games USA’s next free-to-play MMO, which is the handsome-looking Age Of Wushu. The game’s flag-waving feature set all derives from it being based on wuxia-type fictions, which means the characters are capable of absurd Kung Fu movie actions, such as being able to run on the surface of water. It also has a few ideas that are unusual in free MMOs, such as offline skill progression. You can see the AoW characters pulling off all sorts of unlikely moves, as well as slightly too many camera pans over pretty East Asian architecture, in the first trailer, which is below. There’s going to be an “international” beta starting next month. No word on any EU release at present.Read the rest of this entry »

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The beta for intriguing MMO RTS Ministry Of War is opening up, and you guys can get your access to this phase through this link – specially for RPS readers!

For a browser-based RTS it’s looking pretty complex, featuring a number of historical factions with their own hero characters, player-driven trading economics, PvP and Guild vs Guild battles, and the ability to travel about with your merchants, trading as you go. Developers Snail need as many people as possible for this next stage of their testing, so go give it a look.